From a business and bottom line stand point there needs to be an outcome for the money and time are being spent with, and in social media.  Like with most marketing endeavors it needs to be held to a ROI (return on investment).

Facebook is always playing with their insights, and now they have the feature “talking about this.“   I just have never put any ‘real’ value into anything FB has done regarding their tracking systems, or twitter for that matter.  What really matters is Google analytics, which is why it is so critical to have a website if you want to do a better job tracking your ROI in social media.

Google analytics can tell you so much more of a story than FB insights, talking about this, Tap11 or whatever twitter engagement tool you use.  Every business category is different and should take a different approach, and here are a couple of examples of how Google analytics can tell a different story.

This client uses blogs, as well as audio and video links from their website to post on Facebook.  By looking at their Facebook insights or who is talking about this you would see that there is very little engagement or activity, for the record I do see clicking on a link as engagement.

You’ll see that in the past week of the 1,776 visits that 423 came from Facebook.  So while the ‘talk about this’ is listed at 34 and the FB insights don’t reflect the kind of traffic that is comeing to their site.

This next client is very effective in twitter, has a large following, engagement with @mentions are high with lots of retweets.  Our guess would be that there was a good number of links being converted from twitter, but marketing is best done using the numbers rather than guessing.

The analytics here confirm our guess and that the time spent with twitter is worth it.  With 235 of the 898 visits coming from tweets.

 

Having access to several Google analytic accounts in correlation with managing several social media accounts we can say, what you see on FB insights doesn’t always translate into what your website see’s.  There are Facebook pages with lots of acitivity and engagement that doesn’t translate into web traffic and FB accounts that are absolute barron on engagement that have great traffic to their website.

Not all business categories are suited for engagement on Facebook, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but what you should try is to post more links from your website and see if that is the best way that your ‘likes’ on Facebook want to engage with you.

This is just one of the MANY reasons the a website is critical to understanding how people truly react to your business in social media.

 

 

About the Author:

Mike Frey

Before co-founding Paradux Media Group, Mike spent more than 15 years in the world of marketing and advertising. While working with hundreds of locally owned businesses, he developed an appreciation for minimizing clients’ dollars while maximizing tangible results for those clients.

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